Assassinations, assassinations and «sudden» deaths of American presidents. Андрей Тихомиров
All these victories created such popularity for him that the Whig Party offered him a candidacy for the presidency of the United States, although he had not previously held any political positions. As president, Taylor tried to stand above minor party interests, but his health was undermined during Indian campaigns (he often had malaria), and he died (possibly from dysentery or typhus) in the second year of his presidency. The opinion that he was poisoned with arsenic was not confirmed during the exhumation and chemical examination of Taylor's remains in 1991. As president, he opposed radical supporters of the spread of slavery. The second president of the United States, who did not hold any other state post before entering the White House (the first was the founder of the state, George Washington). Taylor was also the last Southern president elected before Woodrow Wilson in 1912.
3. Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) – the 16th President of the United States. In 1860 and 1864, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. On April 9, 1865, the army of the Southerners, who fought the army of Lincoln, under the command of General Lee, capitulated, and on April 14, 1865, Lincoln went with his family to the play "Our American cousin", Extremist Wilkie Booth, picking up the moment when all attention was focused on the stage, approached the president and lined up behind the utor in the head Then he jumped on stage, shouting: "Sic semper tyrannis", a slogan from the state of Virginia, which means: "And so to all tyrants," The next morning Lincoln died. Those sitting in the box clearly did not expect an "invasion", and Booth, without wasting a second, shot the president twice with a .44-caliber pistol. The audience, according to many eyewitnesses, did not immediately understand what had happened. And Booth jumped on stage, ran past the stunned actors and ducked through the door leading backstage. The police gave chase. Here is what The Illustrated London News reported on May 13, 1865: "Booth, whose leg was broken by a fall from a horse that was set by a Maryland surgeon named Mudd, who was then arrested, and his accomplice, named Harold, were found to have taken refuge in a swamp in St. Mary's County, Maryland, They were pursued, but found the means to cross the Potomac, and reached a farm near the Royal Port, on the Rappahannock. There they were escorted by Federal Cavalry, but they barricaded themselves in a barn and refused to surrender. Federal soldiers then set fire to the barn, a fight broke out, during which Harold remained alive and unharmed; but Booth was shot in the head by a sergeant. He lived, however, for about three more hours, and during that time dictated a letter to his mother. Booth's corpse and Harold were received in Washington on the morning of April 27. It was stated that Booth's body, by order of the Military Department, was buried confidentially. Junius Brutus Booth was also arrested on suspicion that he was one of his brother's accomplices." However, when describing the first murder of a head of state in the history of the United States, historians do not always pay due attention to another event that happened on the same day, April 14, 1865, U.S. Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch discussed with President Abraham Lincoln the need to create a special police unit at his department, which would be charged with fighting counterfeiters. For the American economy in the first years after the end of the Civil War, the problem of counterfeit money was one of the most acute. Fifteen hundred banks had the right to issue, that is, issue banknotes, on the eve of the civil war, and there were banknotes of seven thousand samples in circulation in the country. In the USA until the 60s of the 19th century. in each state, many banks combined the functions of commercial and issuing. According to the law of 1863, the right to issue banknotes was granted to all national banks (subject to federal legislation), and since 1865, the banknote issue of state banks has been subject to a 10% issue tax. As a result, state banks ceased to perform issuing functions and only national banks began to act as the latter, but "miscellaneous" banknotes continued to go around, and counterfeiters took full advantage of this. Boots was actually an agent of planters and bankers who did not benefit from Lincoln's policy. As history shows, Lincoln put his signature to McCulloch's proposal. Who of them came up with the idea to call the new police structure the "Secret Service", and remained unknown. And even more so, no one could have imagined that this department, the creation of which the US president discussed with the Minister of Finance a few hours before the fatal shots, would soon be responsible for the security of "top officials". And when Hugh McCulloch sworn in the first director of the Secret Service, William Wood, a veteran of the war with Mexico, on July 5, 1865, the staff of the new structure consisted of a director and only ten agents, and they were charged with the duty to fight counterfeiters. Already in the first four years, its employees arrested more than two hundred counterfeiters and confiscated fakes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since 1867, Secret Service agents have been engaged in mail robberies and frauds with federal land property, hunted smugglers and even followed the Ku Klux Klan, however, soon the Department of Justice convinced Congress to limit the functions of the Secret Service exclusively to combating counterfeiting of money and other government papers.
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